"Владимир Набоков. Эссе о драматургии (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

sort of black and experts will be invited to measure his sanity--that will
be all. But if a perfectly respectable man is slowly but inexorably (and by
the way the "slowly" and the "inexorably" are so used to being together that
the "but" between them ought to be replaced by the wedding ring of an "and")
driven to murder by the creep and crawl of circumstance, or by a
long-repressed passion, or by anything that has long been working at
undermining his will, by things, in short, against which he has been
hopelessly and perhaps nobly struggling--then, whatever his crime, we see in
him a tragic figure. Or again: you happen to meet socially a person of
perfectly normal aspect, good-natured although a little seedy, pleasant
though something of a bore, a trifle foolish, perhaps, but not more so than
anybody else, a character to whom you would never dream of applying the
adjective "tragic"; then you learn that this person several years ago had
been placed by force of circumstance at the head of some great revolution in
a remote, almost legendary country, and that a new force of circumstance had
soon banished him to your part of the world where he lingers on as the mere
ghost of his past glory. Immediately, the very things about the man that had
just seemed to you humdrum (indeed, the very normality of his aspect) now
strike you as the very features of tragedy. King Lear, Nuncle Lear, is even
more tragic when he potters about the place than when he actually kills the
prison guard who was a-hanging his daughter.
So what is the result of our little inquest into the popular meaning of
"tragedy"? The result is that we find the term "tragedy" not only synonymous
with fate, but also synonymous with our knowledge of another man's slow and
inexorable fate. Our next step must be to find what is meant by "fate."
From the two intentionally vague examples that I have selected, one
thing, however, may be clearly deduced. What we learn of another man's fate
is far more than he knows himself. In fact, if he knows himself to be a
tragic figure and acts accordingly, we cease to be interested in him. Our
knowledge of his fate is not objective knowledge. Our imagination breeds
monsters which the subject of our sympathy may never have seen. He may have
been confronted with other terrors, other sleepless nights, other
heartbreaking incidents of which we know nothing. The line of destiny which
ex post facto seems so clear to us may have been in reality a wild scallop
interwoven with other wild scallops of fate or fates. This or that social or
economic background which, if we are Marxist-minded, seems to have played
such an important part in the subject's life may have had nothing to do with
it in this or that particular case, although it does seem to explain
everything so neatly. Consequently, all we possess in regard to our own
judgment of another man's tragic fate is a handful of facts most of which
the man would repudiate; but to this is added what our imagination supplies,
and this imagination of ours is regulated by a sound logic, and this sound
logic of ours is so hypnotized by the conventionally accepted rules of cause
and effect that it will invent a cause and modify an effect rather than have
none at all.
And now observe what has happened. Gossiping around a man's fate has
automatically led us to construct a stage tragedy, partly because we have
seen so many of them at the theatre or at the other place of entertainment,
but mainly because we cling to the same old iron bars of determinism which
have imprisoned the spirit of playwriting for years and years. And this is